If the website and state want to collude to track the user they don't need to send any in-band metadata.

It's what you get for being a tenant rather than owning your own site.

And yet it's worth it for the network effects, sadly. These companies should be regulated, the moats are just too deep.

I like that the EU recognised this and did start to regulate that these companies need to interoperate.

You could probably get away with banning all common english words as usernames if you wanted to.

Until you invent a product or concept name that is taken by one of the users ;-)

Or put all user pages under some top level path and then you never need to ban anything as this problem becomes completely moot.

Even if you don’t ban all words, there are some you should filter:

• <https://ldpreload.com/blog/names-to-reserve>

• <https://xkcd.com/1963/>

This has been around for way longer than tiktok but with ~ instead of @.

I wonder why we left ~ for @.

Maybe become some foreign keyboard layouts don't have the ~ symbol?

The ~ character for home directories was an old convention that dates from the ADM-3A (1976) terminal used by some early Unix users. The keyboard on that terminal happened to have the cursor control word "Home" on the "~" key. This shorthand was adopted by shells like sh/csh and emerged in HTTP urls as /~user/ being the shorthand for a user's personal web page on a site.

Much later in history Twitter popularized the form "@user" to refer to a personal identity. I'm not sure if they invented the usage or not. This is distinct, but probably somehow cognitively related, to the use of "user@host" for email addresses after bang paths fell out of favor.

For reasons I can't quite put my finger on @user seems a much better sigil than ~user to me, so I'm not bothered that it's become popular.

It makes sense in a chatroom if you direct a message @someone (at someone), or if you direct a tweet @someone. So I guess the natural progression of that is @someone becoming the identifier.

> For reasons I can't quite put my finger on @user seems a much better sigil than ~user to me, so I'm not bothered that it's become popular.

I think this makes sense if you pronounce the action. On Twitter you'd tweet [at] user(s). I think it made even more sense back in the Twitter via SMS where you had to send a message to Twitter's number but direct at a particular user.

Wikipedia claims it was invented as an ad-hoc convention by some Twitter users, and eventually it became so popular Twitter started turning @username into links.

You are also one lockpick away from having all valuables in your home stolen. So what?

And if competitor locks were unpickable it wouldn't be regulatory capture to require unpickable locks for people to store valuables in a home. Just because people got away with bad locks for many years, that doesn't mean we have to accept that level of security.

The average browser user isn't using Firefox and won't be any time soon.

If you don't add features that the average user might want, then yeah there won't be any more new users.

If you are competing with giants, you don't go after the average user but an under-served niche instead.

If you go to a niche you never grow then. There are plenty of browsers that already serve those niches anyway

If I smash your window every day but one day after being asked to stop again and again I decide to just leave poop on your front porch instead, should you not complain about the poop?

Malicious compliance is no compliance, it is still malicious.

Mainly it's just developers not wanting to hear what people say.